The Apify web scraping, data extraction, and automation platform

What do you like best about the product?

Apify is its ease of use, reliable web scraping capabilities, and extensive library of ready-to-use actors. It allows us to automate data collection quickly and scale projects without spending time maintaining custom scraping infrastructure.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main drawback is that usage costs can become harder to predict as projects scale. New users may also need some time to learn the platform’s workflows and advanced features.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify solves the challenge of collecting and managing web data at scale. By automating data extraction and monitoring tasks, it saves us time, reduces manual work, and provides faster access to valuable business insights.

What do you like best about the product?

The documentation is well written and easy to understand, even for people whose mother tongue isn’t English.

What do you dislike about the product?

It’s an expensive product for Brazilians.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed to build scrapers for social media, and Apify’s scrapers helped us a lot throughout the process.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like most about Apify is how quickly it allows you to start collecting data from public websites. The platform offers a large library of ready to use actors, reliable cloud execution, and excellent scalability. It eliminates much of the complexity involved in building and maintaining custom scraping infrastructure, which saves a significant amount of development time.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing can become expensive as usage scales, especially for large scraping workloads. Some advanced use cases also require familiarity with web scraping concepts, and debugging failed runs can occasionally take time. However, these are relatively minor drawbacks compared to the value the platform provides.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

My overall experience with Apify has been very positive. It is a reliable platform that consistently gets the job done for scraping public websites and automating data collection workflows. The combination of ready made tools, cloud infrastructure, and flexible integrations makes it easy to deploy and scale scraping projects. It has saved me considerable development and maintenance effort compared to managing custom scrapers.

What do you like best about the product?

The combination of flexibility and reliability is what keeps me coming back. I can grab a ready-made actor from the marketplace and be collecting data within minutes, or build something fully custom when the use case demands it. Either way, the results are consistent and the output is clean and structured – ready to plug straight into my workflow without any cleanup. For someone running multiple automated pipelines across different sources, that kind of dependability is everything.

What do you dislike about the product?

The learning curve when building custom actors can be steep if you're not comfortable with JavaScript or Python. It's not a dealbreaker, but newer users without a technical background might need some time to get past the basics. Better visual tooling or more guided templates for custom builds would make the platform accessible to a much wider audience.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Apify, monitoring job boards, discussion groups, and lead sources was eating 2-3 hours of my day. Now it runs automatically in the background and I check structured results in minutes. That time saving alone is significant, but the bigger benefit is speed – being first to spot and respond to new opportunities directly translates to more business won. On top of that, delivering automated data pipelines has become a service I actively offer to clients, so Apify went from being a personal productivity tool to a billable part of my work.

What do you like best about the product?

This has literally saved me so much time that it’s spared me from having to hire a VA. I couldn’t be happier!

What do you dislike about the product?

The price feels very expensive, and I’d really like to see cheaper options.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It saves me time and money when I’m scanning Google Maps for prospects.

What do you like best about the product?

A very stable API marketplace platform, with a good customer support

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing in particular, they provide exactly what I expected

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Scraping from social platforms efficient data collection

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Apify is how easy it makes web scraping and data collection at scale. The platform provides many ready-to-use actors, reliable cloud execution, and scheduling capabilities, which significantly reduce the time and effort required to build and maintain scraping workflows.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main drawback is the learning curve for new users who are not familiar with web scraping concepts. Some actors could also benefit from more detailed documentation and examples to make setup and customization easier.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify helps automate the collection of data from multiple websites, reducing the amount of manual research and repetitive work required. This saves time, improves data consistency, and allows me to focus more on analysis and development rather than gathering information.

What do you like best about the product?

The Actor Store is what gets me every time. I remember when I first needed Instagram data for an AI agent I was building, I was ready to spend weeks coding a scraper from scratch, dealing with proxies, anti-bot systems, the whole headache. Then I found Apify, searched the Store, found exactly what I needed, configured it in maybe 20 minutes, and the data was flowing into my n8n pipeline.
That's the thing that really stuck with me. As a solo developer running multiple projects at the same time, I can't afford to waste time reinventing the wheel. Apify basically handed me enterprise-level scraping infrastructure without asking me to become an infrastructure engineer first. The reliability is also something I genuinely appreciate, once an Actor is running on a schedule, it just works. Clean output, consistent delivery, no surprises. That kind of dependability is rare and it's what keeps me coming back.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing model is honestly the biggest friction point. There are two layers, platform credits and per-Actor costs on top of that, and when you're just starting out it's not immediately obvious how fast things can add up. I had a couple of runs that burned through credits faster than expected because I didn't fully understand how a specific Actor charged per result. A clearer cost estimator before you hit run would save a lot of headaches.
The UI also has room to grow. It's functional, but debugging a failed run takes more clicks than it should. When something breaks mid-pipeline, I want to know exactly what went wrong without having to dig through logs manually. Better inline error reporting would make a real difference for developers running Apify in production environments.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The core problem was data. My AI sales agent needed real Instagram data to function, and without a reliable way to collect it, the whole system just didn't work. I was either scraping manually, which doesn't scale at all, or looking at building my own scraper from scratch, which would've taken weeks and still probably broken every time Instagram updated something.
Apify solved that completely. Now the data flows automatically into my n8n pipeline, lands clean in Supabase, and my AI agents pick it up from there to qualify leads and trigger WhatsApp outreach sequences. The whole thing runs on its own.
In practical terms: what used to be a bottleneck that blocked the entire system is now something I don't think about anymore. I went from spending time fighting infrastructure to spending time improving the actual intelligence layer, the prompts, the logic, the client results. That shift alone is worth a lot when you're a solo developer trying to build something serious with limited time and resources.

What do you like best about the product?

I'm a computer science student from Namibia who started building web scraping actors on Apify about 6 months ago. I now have 2 live monetized actors on the Apify Store covering African real estate and e-commerce data, and I've already received my first payout.
The platform is genuinely well built. The actor system makes it easy to package and monetize scraping tools, the proxy infrastructure is reliable, and the store gives you real distribution. The documentation is solid and the developer relations team has been supportive.
If you're a developer looking to build and monetize data products, Apify is the best platform I've found for it. The pay-per-result pricing model works well for both sides.

What do you dislike about the product?

The free tier limits make it difficult to test actors thoroughly before publishing, running out of compute credits mid-test is frustrating when you're still in development. The automated quality testing system that flags actors as "under maintenance" can also be overly aggressive; it flagged my actor repeatedly even after fixing the issue, which temporarily hurt my store visibility. Better documentation around the input schema defaults required for automated testing would save new developers a lot of time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify solves the problem of building, hosting, and monetizing web scraping tools without needing to manage your own infrastructure. As a developer in Namibia, I was able to build scrapers for African real estate and e-commerce data, markets that are largely ignored by existing data providers, and publish them to a global marketplace where paying customers can find and use them.
The platform handles proxies, scheduling, storage, billing, and payouts. That means I can focus purely on building the scraper logic rather than DevOps. Within a few months I went from zero to three live monetized actors covering Property24 across 9 African countries and Takealot product data, and received my first payout of over $200.
For developers in emerging markets especially, Apify levels the playing field, you can build a data product once and sell it globally without needing a company, payment infrastructure, or marketing budget beyond the store listing itself.

What do you like best about the product?

The biggest benefit for us has been the ability to automate large scale social media and web data collection without needing to constantly maintain custom scraping systems ourselves. We regularly use Apify for competitor monitoring, trend analysis, and collecting public engagement data, and it has reduced hours of manual research work each week.

The Apify Store is one of the strongest parts of the platform because many common scraping tasks already have ready made Actors available. Instead of building workflows from scratch, we can usually deploy and customise an existing Actor quite quickly. The scheduling system is reliable, data exports are straightforward, and integrating outputs into spreadsheets and reporting workflows is simple.

The interface is also much cleaner and easier to manage than many other scraping platforms we tested. Even for more advanced workflows, the dashboard makes it easy to monitor runs, troubleshoot issues, and manage datasets. Pricing can increase on larger projects, but for the amount of time it saves and the scale of data it allows us to collect, the ROI has been very good overall.

What do you dislike about the product?

The only real downside we have found is that some community maintained Actors can occasionally break when websites change their layouts or anti bot protections. It is usually resolved quite quickly, but it does mean certain workflows sometimes need small adjustments or maintenance to keep them running smoothly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify solves the problem of manually collecting and organising large amounts of public web and social media data. It allows us to automate competitor monitoring, trend research, and data collection workflows that would otherwise take hours each week to do manually. This has improved efficiency, made reporting more consistent, and allowed us to analyse much larger datasets than would be practical with manual research alone.